Supporting educational activities through dynamic web interfaces

The Web is used for many purposes in education, such as the publication of course management information, centralized distribution of course materials, and supporting on-line discussions between instructors and students or among the students themselves. Leveraging off the Web for educational activities both inside and outside the classroom produces a dynamic educational repository. In this paper, we present work that explicitly attempts to connect in-class activity, in the form of multimedia, Web-accessible captured lectures, with collaborative discussion spaces. Flexible and dynamic interfaces for the captured lectures and the discussion spaces are presented, as well as specialized interfaces that connect the two. We discuss our experience in a recent course taught using this integrated and dynamic educational repository and explain how our experience has lead to some solutions for visualizing the changes that occur over this rich space.